What small household fixes have made everyday life noticeably easier?

[HardyPinkPanda]

I’m between jobs at the moment and have decided to use some of the time to basically snag my own house.

I’m going through every room and making a note of all the little things that have mildly irritated me for YEARS, but which I’ve somehow just accepted as part of life. You know the sort of thing - not actual problems, just things you regularly curse under your breath and then continue living with for another five years.

So far I have:

1. Ruthlessly slimmed down the kitchen cupboards so I could lose one cupboard and fit a tumble dryer. Every winter I normally spend approximately 46% of my waking hours hanging damp clothes around the house and rotating them like prize livestock, so I’m disproportionately excited about this.

2. Reorganised the Tupperware so every container now lives WITH ITS OWN LID. No more rummaging through 17 lids while slowly losing the will to live.

3. Thrown out about 12 random, ancient, slightly raggedy towels that had been granted permanent residency in the airing cupboard. It now has SPACE. Things are FOLDED.

4. Replaced the sieve that hasn’t had a handle since approximately 2020. Why did I just... live like that?

5. Put bigger shoe storage by the door, so we no longer have the traditional hallway shoe landslide.

6. Rewired a switch so it finally works the way you instinctively expect it to work rather than requiring a tiny moment of irritation every single time.

Honestly, none of this is exactly world peace, but the cumulative improvement to my quality of life is ridiculous. I keep thinking, WHY DID I PUT UP WITH THIS FOR SO LONG?

So humour me: what tiny, boring, seemingly insignificant thing have you changed/fixed/bought/reorganised in your house that has made you disproportionately happy?

I want the really mundane ones. The things nobody is putting on Grand Designs but which have genuinely made your day-to-day life better.

Basically, tell me what else I should be wandering around my house looking for 😂

Got the electrician to put a 5ft LED strip light in the windowless garage so I can now see everything.

Also put a handle on the exterior of our wooden front door, so it's easy to pull shut. It's 1930s original, why no previous owner had ever done this baffles me, it was so hard to close!

Meaco is the brand leader. If your room is normal indoors temperatures, get a refrigerant one. If it's cold, get a desiccant one.
I wouldn't be without mine.

Now I'm thinking "why the hell didn't I do THAT instead?" 😆

Alcove cupboards! They hide so much, so much junk.

Haven't rtft yet so I don't know if anyone else has said this yet but if you freeze your floor for 24-48hrs it kills off all of the weevil eggs. Then I pour it into jars.

I stuck a hook high on the wall near the door and that's where the key lives at night. My letterbox is the very narrow kind that you can't look through it and even if you could, you wouldn't see it.

I do with this with a perm marker after everyone decided they wanted white bedding so I have 2 double and 1 king

I also fold all bedding sets and put them inside one of the pillow cases so when I need a fresh set im not hunting for specific pillowcases I.e waffle, or hotel lined etc and then a right size sheet. Even my kids do it now at uni

My best hack: stop buying more storage. If you keep buying storage, you fill it. I have a more or less one in one out policy on everything. The charity shops have done well out of me.

I also went through my airing cupboard this summer and got rid of a fuckton of stuff I don't use. I haven't filled it up again, either. Instead there's now space for it to be neat and organised and a pleasure to look at.

That's one cupboard. The rest are still to do.

Tupperware:
https://www.lakeland.co.uk/products/10-stack-a-boxes-food-storage-containers-750ml
we have these in 3 sizes. Same lids. Tessellate beautifully in the freezer

(and you get to rediscover tessellate as a word)

did you get an answer?

yup, as Flylady used to say "You can't organise clutter"

We have a look like this for our balcony doors (1st floor flat)- used to just keep them in the door but toddler DD put paid to that so now a command hook on the wall next to them works well

I love some of the ideas here, and will adopt adapt them, but DC is just in the first throes of owning his own kitchen, and he is a trained chef (not working in the field any longer) and one of his stipulations for his first home kitchen is that there HAS to be a kitchen counter with an overhang wide enough to clamp a pasta machine firmly. In the family kitchen there is one, but in two years of rentals, no. So kitchen details are extremely personal.

I store spices in a drawer and stick labels on the jar tops.

Yetone · Today 16:31
"A relative was a fire fighter and gave me a lecture about locking the front door and putting the key somewhere else. Now I either leave the key in the lock or just leave it on the Yale lock only."

I absolutely agree about keeping a key near all the locked doors but I don't leave my key in the lock because if there is a key in one side, you can't put a key in the other side. I had an expensive lesson with this many years ago. I nipped outside to get the paper in and left the key in the lock on the inside, a gust of wind slammed the door and I was left outside. Luckily my neighbour was in and I could phone a locksmith. You only do it once!

I made myself a wish list of every single little job that needs doing and each weekend I pick one or two and do them. Stupidly they have been lingering for nearly 10 years and most of them have taken less than an hour and hardly any cost.

i’ve replaced our internal door handles with black ones.
i’ve sanded and painted our back door
cleared a few drawers / changed storage around
put 2 shelves up in the kitchen for open storage

the list remains long and I constantly add things onto the end but it feels more manageable to do it room by room and one job at a time- and it’s ok if I don’t finish it today, I will finish it next weekend.

I realise I missed the point of the thread 🤣

one thing I saw on Stacey Solomon was when you have multiple kids and pass clothes down, put a coloured dot in sharpie on the labels of the younger child’s clothes, so as things get passed down you add the dot - helps when sorting washing!

one thing I am going to introduce is those coloured buckets, one for each of us, for clean washing. I am so tired of handling washing multiple times, there’s no reason why I can’t get sorted off the washing line into individual buckets and straight into rooms and the buckets stack up when not in use

Wrapping paper station, bows, gift bags, paper for inside gift bags. So much easier to access when needed. I use one of those door hanger organisers, with a couple of the pockets cut out so it can fit wrapping paper

I only have one set of bed linen per bed, I can wash and dry one set in a day and have them back on the bed by evening. I do keep a large white flat sheet and a spare duvet (in a cover) and some pillowcases in case of emergency.

we all have a set of towels in our own colour so that they never get mixed up and can be reused.

A nice big box for all the hats and gloves and scarves to live in. I had one growing up, and it was brilliant. I don't know how I went without for so long in my adult life. It has a lid, which discourages people from dumping random things in it. You can leave slightly-damp items on top of the lid until they've dried enough to join their friends inside.

I would love pictures of all your fabulous Top Tips ... especially the robo vacuum cleaner and the coverless duvets!

MN you did it again!

Thank you OP.

I love our charity shop box. I think I've had a permanent one for about twenty years now. I take stuff to the same charity shop identified because of its location and parking.

We had to move last year and it made me more critically analyse what was staying and what was going. Since then I look at stuff and think if we haven't used it since we moved, it's not staying. It's no longer about what we can fit in our house but that everything kept in the house needs managing and that managing ends up falling to me....I don't want to!

Hairdryer and straighteners hanging on command hooks near the mirror

Shredding lives in plain sight on top of the shredder which makes me do it straight away as I don't want to see it. If I hid it away, I'd end up with a mountain.

Everyone does their own washing and drying 🙂 they clean their own rooms too.

Two waste paper baskets in some rooms like the study and our bedroom. One for recycling and one for general waste.

Cleaning supplies in the bathroom. I'm thinking of keep some general things in the airing cupboard upstairs too.

A bulldog clip on the bedside table with the phone cable thread through the handles.

Keep a permanent pen that writes on shiny surfaces in the kitchen

Just bought some velvet type clothes hangers from Aldi. My clothes look very satisfying.

Six months ago I turned the hangers the wrong way around to check out what I was wearing....if I keep putting off wearing something, I get rid of it.

Please tell me where you got these🙏 I hang all my washing on hangers but when drying outside the hangers end up congregating together or blowing off the line.

This is a very 'late to the party' thing. But having spent years washing dishes, I was finally in a position to get a whole new kitchen. With it, I got my first ever dishwasher. It has transformed my life! I once again bake, and cook so much more because I don't have to deal with a ton of dishes afterwards.

Folding duvet covers and sheets in a pillowcase. No scrambling round for them at midnight when you forget you stripped the bed. Saves on storage too.